#i don't want anyone to think i liked jackkeeley i DIDN'T

[lunar-years]

The JackKeeley story would have been vastly improved imo if they had actually used it as a mechanism to explore Keeley's headspace with both her 3-season cycle of crumbling relationships and her struggles with her job. Like, yeah Jack was definitely...something... as a character. Incredibly unlikable, obviously. A conservative elitist bitch who saw Keeley as someone she needed to hid to protect her own image, absolutely. Lauding Keeley around the office and showering her with gifts in this weird peacocking of their power imbalance, yes. And then to top it off she went and decided to victim blame her girlfriend after Keeley refused to do what Jack wanted her to do/"risked" Jack's precious reputation. All of which was completely gross, and it was unpleasant to watch, and I totally get why people hate it on that alone. BUT Jack was a Plot Device character, which I personally could probably have gone along with so long as she like...actually serviced an arc worth telling with a satisfying conclusion, anddd that's where the show lost me.

I think the writers sort of tried to do something interesting with it, what with showing how depressed and spiraling Keeley got after that breakup and maybe making half a reference to her abandonment issues and having her panic over the loss of her funding. But, rather than the end result being Keeley grasping hold of her own life and taking space to reexamine what she actually wants out of both her relationships and career, she... immediately falls back into old patterns (by sleeping with Roy despite not wanting to get back together with him just to feel something or whatever, which is then never explicitly addressed as a bad move or ill advised behavior) and gets her business back by...virtue of having a rich friend who can swoop in with several thousand pounds and fix all her problems (i cannot begin to tell you how much I loathed Rebecca fixing everything for her instead of Keeley finding her own path back). At the VERY LEAST I wish she had gotten the opportunity to process the things that had happened to her in that relationship and how damaged she clearly felt by it, lean on her friends for emotional support and healing (rather than having them pull out their wallets and immediately problem solved), and have an honest and frank conversation with Roy about how he, too, hurt her and his apology wasn't good enough and wasn't going to fix everything immediately. That's what Keeley deserved.

Which is all to say, I definitely did not enjoy Jack or the JackKeeley relationship, but I would've been willing to forgive a lot if including her had felt like...purposeful? Instead (like Zava & Shandy and a lot of things in s3 tbh) it just felt like she was taking up a bunch of screen time while not furthering Keeley (the main character we are all very invested in and actually care about) at all in her journey. Instead the show just kept kicking Keeley while she was down and then at the end everything was magically grand again with Keeley having next to no real agency in any of it. That's why keeley's s3 storyline was so damn bad (Jack included).